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Tag Archives: william friedkin

Horror movies–particularly of the supernatural variety–are perpetual favorites around my household, but during the Halloween season we tend to watch even more of them. As a child and teenager, I cut my teeth on the genre. I loved fantasy, science fiction, and Westerns too, but it was horror that I connected with the strongest. What that says about me psychologically, well… don’t tell me what you think. It’ll just make me morbidly self-conscious.

The horror genre–more so than any other kind of movie, I think–tends to get judged by its worst examples. You mention that you love horror and immediately most people think slasher killers, serial killers, and so-called torture porn. You mention that you love supernatural fiction or movies, those same people are likely to nod their heads in solidarity when Repulsion, The Shining, and Black Sunday are named. That’s not to say that I’m not up for a great knife-wielding maniac picture like Psycho, Blood and Black Lace, or Tenebrae, but my taste runs more toward the weird, surreal, and unnerving than say, The Human Colostomy Bag or whatever gag-inducing picture is driving the kids wild these days.

This season we’ve been revisiting horror classics, movies we saw too many times earlier in our lives but haven’t viewed in ten years or so. Stuff like George A. Romero’s highly influential Night of the Living Dead and the equally trendsetting William Friedkin picture The Exorcist.

There’s no need to say much more about them. They’re true classics that have weathered the years and passing trends well. They’re scary, beautifully crafted in their own distinctive ways, and they linger in the imagination long after they end. They may not be my personal favorites, but there’s no arguing their mythic stature as the luxury models of the field and I do love them.

Below are two videos I put together. The Night of the Living Dead score is famously swiped from various music library sources. The music suite from The Exorcist is Lalo Schifrin’s rejected score. It’s great, but you can also hear why Friedkin went with using work from modern composers George Crumb and Krzystof Penderecki instead. Make sure to watch them with the lights out and in HD for the best picture quality.

Horror movies were a big, pivotal influence on me during my youth, especially in the post-Halloween years. In the 1980s I watched everything I could get my claws on, whether in the theater (it was a time when the local theaters could care less if you were underage, just as long as your mom popped her head in the box office and gave the ticket cashier the “okay”), on cable, or on videocassette. I watched things I probably shouldn’t have (Maniac, Don’t Go in the House, Don’t Answer the Phone, et al). But I also viewed movies that branded themselves in my overactive brain, ruining me forever in the best of ways (John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Shining, Dawn of the Dead, Phantasm, Scanners, Gates of Hell, and so many more), and have never failed to entertain, fascinate, and disturb me to this day.

Although a steady diet of slashers, Italian zombies, and rubbery over-the-top gore fests were what kept me sane through my teenage years, it was horror films of an earlier vintage that put their hooks in me. My first real memories are of monsters, ghouls, and creatures from beyond the grave–King Kong, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, Godzilla, and all the rest. Back in the early 1970s in Portland the local television station KATU would air a program on Saturday nights at 11:30 called Sinister Cinema, that would show a double-feature of old horror movies hosted by a bearded Victor Ives in Dracula cape, along with his sidekick the late Jimmy Hollister. It was monstertastic, to say the least, and the perfect entertainment for a monster kid like myself. Not to get too nostalgic… but I sometimes feel sad that kids now don’t get programs like Sinister Cinema or Creature Features (a Bay Area program that I used to see whenever we’d visit relatives down in San Jose every summer). Then again, cable television and DVDs have made it a whole lot easier for monster-minded parents to indoctrinate their horror-happy tyke with a wider variety of scaretastic goodies in ways that I couldn’t have dreamed of as a wee lad. There’s simply so much more out there to offer up. And I say cheers to that! But sadly, the horror hosts seem to have left the mausoleum for good.

As we creep toward another Halloween, I thought I’d post some trailers from a few of my favorite horror films. I’ll start with some from the 1960s, one of my favorite eras. Not necessarily the best trailers, but definitely my favorite films. Now, outside of Rosemary’s Baby (which I remember seeing on television when it aired on ABC when I was around six), I sadly didn’t see any of these until my late teens or in my twenties. Nevertheless, they’re faves and I revisit them often.

The first trailer is for Georges Franju’s lyrical masterpiece Les Yeux sans Visage (1959), aka Eyes Without a Face. Although the American trailer–double-billed with the deliriously enjoyable though campy The Manster–makes it seem over-the-top, this French film is anything but despite the plot elements straight from a 1930s pulp magazine. It’s a haunting, strangely moving experience and one that sets the tone for other serious-minded, atmospheric, fetishistic, and extreme Euro horrors that would be released over the next two decades. Though no film, except for perhaps moments in Argento’s Suspiria or Inferno would be able to capture the dark poetry so integral to Franju’s parable.

The second clip is for the Italian film The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962), starring the iconic Barbara Steele. Talk about fetishistic! It’s one of my all-time favorite horror films and why it hasn’t been released on DVD is a crime. You can read more about the film here, which was written by Glenn Erickson aka DVD Savant originally for the online web zine Images (a site I also wrote reviews for). The trailer doesn’t really sell it correctly… but don’t let that stop you from seeing the film if you run across a cassette of it. It’s brilliant.

The third trailer is for Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill! (1966). If the first five minutes doesn’t pull you into its fierce, hallucinatory design… then you may just not like horror films. Bava’s a favorite around my house and he has more than one great film in his long resume. But there’s something about this one–the period setting, the little girl revenant, the score–that nails me every time. It obviously made an impact on Fellini as well, since he pays wonderful homage to it in his Toby Dammit segment of Spirits of the Dead. And one can’t help but think that Martin Scorsese had Bava on the brain when he made The Last Temptation of Christ, personifying Satan in the guise of a little girl to tempt Jesus from the cross.

The fourth trailer is for the great Hammer horror film, The Devil Rides Out (1968). Based on the Dennis Wheatley novel of the same name, this is one of the best non-monster movies that the famed British studio ever put out, if not the best. Black magic, an Aleister Crowley-type villain, Christopher Lee as the suave hero Duc de Richleau, satanic orgies, and a blitzkrieg-paced script by Richard Matheson… what’s not to love? This is old school Hammer horror at its finest.

And then there’s Rosemary’s Baby. This is Roman Polanski at his most fiendishly polished and enjoyable. Along with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist it’s also one of the best big studio horror productions ever.